I made a PIE!

News Flash: TASH has finally learned the art of baking a pie (a number one requirement as a Crozier due to the family’s love of rhubarb custard pie). Last night, our friends Steve and Kristy had us over and Kristy walked me through how to make a pie . . . surprise of all surprises – it wasn’t that hard. It actually reminded me a lot of making scones – which I love doing, because while the ingredients are different, the steps are the same, with the same careful adding of liquid, just enough to make the dough stick but not much more. It was a good way to spend an evening and I really enjoyed it. The pie was delicious and we happily consumed half of it right after it came out of the oven. I am looking forward to eating the rest for dessert tonight!

And alas – we did not take a picture, otherwise I would show it off to you.

House hunting

Today, we spent the afternoon going to open houses in Edmonds, Lynnwood and Mountlake Terrace. It was a sunny day which made it much more fun and we had a great time. We saw 6-7 places – some planned and some just because we saw another “open house” sign on the road and followed it. I love driving around neighbourhoods. Some of the places we saw were hideous – there was one split level from 1973 which had seriously not been changed since that decade. Orange carpet in the hall, green, blue mixed with purple, and pink carpets in the bedrooms upstairs. Yuck! And it had a really weird bedroom with bathroom which you could only access through the garage – for the bad kid in the family??? Or the teenager’s best attempt at moving out? The yard was awesome but the rest was not.

Then we dropped in and hung out with our friends John and Stacy (we know a lot of Johns). It’s crazy to realize that I’ve known her for a year now! Last August when I couldn’t work, I babysat for another girl and met Stacy at the park with her daughters Izzy and Julia. I started babysitting for them and we’ve hung out a lot over the last year. Julia has gone from being an infant to walking – it’s amazing to see how much they grow in one year. Izzy is still my all time favourite four year old. You may have seen pictures of her on John’s blog here and here.

Journals, Literature and Merton

I’ve been going through my old journals today, indulging in a bout of nostalgia. One notebook is full of starts of stories – I can tell which books or movies I must have been reading when I started writing these. My handwriting is still from elementary school – maybe early junior high. It makes me laugh to see how formal I was – how the heavy British influence started so young with Enid Blyton, Frances Hodgson Burnett etc. In some ways, I feel like my love of British literature makes it harder for me to be a writer today – what I want to write and how I want to write is in no way modern or North American.

A cut out of one of Thomas Merton’s poems – I’m forgetting which right now. Forgive the formatting, I’m copying this out of a journal I had copied it into.

I will try like them

To be my own silence.

And this is difficult. The whole

World is secretly on fire. The stones

Burn even the stones

They burn me. How can a man be still or

listen to all things burning? How can he dare

to sit with them when

all their silence

is on fire?

Donate Rice with your vocabulary

Someone sent this to me this morning . . . and I must say, it’s highly addicting for a word nerd. The highest level I maintained was 43, not bad if no one usually gets over 50. Give it a whirl and see how many words you really know (all while donating rice to the hungry!).
http://www.freerice.com/

Tango class

There’s the 50-something anorexic woman with the skinny legs of adolescence, frail, childlike. The atmosphere of youth is emphasized by her short skirt and tank top, her style must have stayed in college, her hips too narrow to have had children of her own. It’s her face that betrays her body; her skin is dry and wrinkled, her hair full of grey. Her eyes, heavy with dark make-up are dull and blank. She moves, stiffly upright, expressionless.

There’s the girl who overdressed, but mostly on purpose. She knows she looks adorable in her bright orange low-cut dress, her high stilettos, eyes flitting out from side to side through straightened hair, to catch people watching her. She’s begging for attention with a big wide-eyed innocent smile. I’m pretty, right? Look, I’m in love. She holds his hand, each adoring motion almost staged, as if she were acting in her own private film, a thousand invisible cameras making her move self-consciously, making sure she’s graceful. It’s all too overdone, too obvious. She wants you to be jealous, wants you to see how happy she is, wants you to feel like she’s the most beautiful girl in the room, even though on closer look she’s not. She’s just the most obvious.

There’s the alternative girl who in her world is just as dressed up as the orange dress girl. She wears her dark blue tight skinny jeans that flow right down almost into her flats, a vintage jacket with a sharp angled cut, and a filmy scarf knotted around her throat. She’s no nonsense: you can see the disdain in her faintly raised eyebrow as she eyes the exaggerations of emotion, a total disconnect between their worlds though their ages are probably even. In her world, the stoic calm is cool.

Scrap of something

Something I started working on today – fairly rough still but hey, I’m dusting off my poetry skills which have lain dormant since high school. Actually, I banished them for awhile, but I’ve been thinking lately, probably influenced by Jess’s blog that I should give it a whirl again sometime. The rhythm for this was in my head but it doesn’t quite all fit and I’m not sure it’s really done where it ends. Oh well – as one of my favourite quotes says, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned” or Oscar Wilde who commented that he knew a poem was done when he spent the whole morning inserting a comma, and the rest of the afternoon removing it.

Lament.

This gap yawns vast in me

A lack of curiosity

That sits so idly at home

Content to know the things we know

No need to waste the energy

On learning more than necessary

The watered seeds of apathy

Grow in our inactivity

We have no stamina of thought

For complicated word and pattern

We cannot rise to the occasion

Incapable of concentration

And so a river thick with ignorance

Floods our minds with empty business

Truth no longer is imparted

Through the avenue of artists

The Day is Done

This is one of my favourite poems to read aloud. I love it because I can hear my Grandpa’s voice when I read it. He quoted the whole thing for us once and his voice has that perfect story-teller quality to it. When we were little and couldn’t see Grandpa and Grandma very often, they would send us tapes with them reading or telling us stories. I can remember Grandpa’s voice reading “The Large and Growly Bear” and Grandma reading us “Yip and Yap.” I’m sure those tapes are somewhere at home – it would be fun to listen to them again.

Anyway, here is “The Day is Done” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The Day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.
I see the lights of the village	5
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me
That my soul cannot resist:
A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,	10
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.
Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,	15
And banish the thoughts of day.
Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.	20
For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life’s endless toil and endeavor;
And to-night I long for rest.
Read from some humbler poet,	25
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;
Who, through long days of labor,
And nights devoid of ease,	30
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.
Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction	35
That follows after prayer.
Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice.	40
And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.

End of Summer BBQ

We had a great time last night at a BBQ hosted by John and Sarah. John and I brought homemade pizza dough and a variety of toppings and cooked up a storm of BBQ’d pizzas, which are to die for. I wish we had taken pictures of them all because they were mouth-wateringly delicious. There was pepperoni, artichoke-heart chicken with garlic cream sauce, ham & pineapple, and basil tomato fresh mozzerella. It was a blast and we have some leftovers today which I’m excited about.

Then we spent about 5 hours playing different games including my new favourite: Ticket to Ride Europe.

This game is super fun. Brad and Bailey told us about it and we played an online trial version a couple times and decided to buy it. There’s an American edition, and also German and Swiss additions. This one is Europe in 1910. The point is to complete your tickets by playing your train cars between your different destinations.

I love all the attention to detail in this game. The illustrations are beautiful. And while it’s a strategic game, you can kind of decide how competitive you want it to be so that’s nice, if you’re like John and me, who sometimes have trouble playing games like Carcassonne together when you have to “play mean” in order to win. This game is probably ideal as a four player game, but it’s still really fun to play with two.

Today is Labour Day, so it’s nice to be at home and enjoy one extra weekend day. It’s gray but we’re hoping to go down to Bumpershoot later. Also, I am craving pan – which after much internet searching, I discovered is normally called melonpan even though there is no melon flavouring (it looks like a melon). It’s a sweet roll, kind of like brioche, and a sugar cookie is baked on top of it. Sounds weird but something about the unique mix of textures and the fact that I love both sugar cookies and brioche make this combination impossible to resist. So we’ll probably be heading out to the bakery where Sarah works later today! My tastebuds are already excited.